Did ‘Champagne Supernova’ derail Oasis’ career?

Posted On January 16, 2025January 16, 2025

Not many bands have a singular moment where everything crashlanded like Oasis had with Be Here Now. Although the album does have a fair bit of decent songs sprinkled throughout its runtime, all 1990s purists and even Noel Gallagher himself see is a sad epitaph of the band at the top of the world, not realising that they are about to fall back down to Earth in a blaze of glory. While the song ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong’ couldn’t have been a more fitting title for Noel on Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, the signs of problems setting in actually began one album before.

Then again, there aren’t many Oasis fans who would have too many problems with their first two projects. Definitely Maybe is the sound of them at their punkiest, and even though What’s the Story Morning Glory became one of the biggest-selling albums in the country for a reason, tunes like ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ haven’t lost their lustre as finely crafted pop tunes.

There are even some moments where the group change things up slightly, like the Pink Floyd-esque ‘Cast No Shadow’, but everything builds until they finally reach ‘Champagne Supernova’ at the very end of the project. And compared to the other epics that have come and gone in rock music, this may as well be their ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Hotel California’, albeit if it were sung in the style of John Lennon and played like Slade.

Compared to everything they had done before, the entire production sounds absolutely gargantuan, which suits the song’s theme of being caught in a psychedelic haze and thinking about the meaning of life. Everything about it is meant to be epic, but there’s a good chance that Noel saw what the song had become and started getting a horrible idea in the back of his head.

Because listening to how the group cratered, ‘Champagne Supernova’ is Patient Zero for everything going wrong. Despite it being one of the finest songs they have ever made, Noel seemed to take all of the wrong lessons from the tune when sculpting out the tracks for Be Here Now, somehow convincing himself that the reason why the song worked was because it ran for so long.

While the nearly eight-minute runtime does add to the spectacle, it does them no favours when trying to make songs like ‘Magic Pie’ and ‘Stand By Me’ sound the exact same way. The hooks on both tracks are fine on their own, but they are far better suited to songs that last four minutes instead of seven.

That’s not a knock on the band’s penchant for longer tracks, either. ‘Columbia’ spends most of its runtime blasting into your eardrums, and ‘Rock and Roll Star’s outro is one of the best parts of any Oasis track, but it’s clear that Noel was more accustomed to making something with the length of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ rather than ‘Slide Away’ at that stage.

And while they did adapt to the longer runtimes with psychedelic-sounding tunes on Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, the reason why later songs like ‘The Importance of Being Idle’ and ‘Songbird’ work is because of how punchy they are compared to where they had been. ‘Champagne Supernova’ still deserves to be celebrated among the best Oasis tunes ever recorded, but it’s hard to look at what comes next and see the dramatic tailspin starting its rotation.

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